I recently received a question about posting job advertisements on a tight budget. The question and my response are below.

“Are there any free websites and online job boards where I can post vacant positions for free? I have been tasked with conducting a nationwide job search on a shoestring budget.”

My Response:

With a budget of “cheap to free” you are not going to find a lot of sources with huge nationwide networks and audiences. Any business with a nationwide network or audience is not going to give away the milk when they can sell you the cow so to speak. That being said there are many ways around your issue.

There are many free job posting sites or networks, but most are locally or industry focused. For free sites you might checkout PDXMindshare, Joblab and Portland Creative List. However they many of these examples are for marketing, digital, design and interactive jobs in the Portland metro area. State employment departments will also post jobs for free. Sometimes applicant tracking systems (see below) and employment department postings will be picked up and syndicated by the big paid job sites. Veterans services and disability advocacy organizations will also often post jobs for free.

If you are willing to pay to post on Linked-In you can syndicate your posting onto all the groups you are a part of. You might be able to do this without paying by posting positions to groups, but it would be time intensive if even possible. Craigslist is super cheap and even free in some areas such as the Oregon Coast for example. Of course bigger population center postings will cost more.

Twitter and social media might be a really good option for you too. Just research which tags might work for your position and company. #PDXJobs, career(s)# and #jobs all would be good. Under the bigger tags you will need to repost to stay out there. Of course the biggest free network you have access to is your companies employees, friends and families using them for referrals and outreach will be your best sources of good candidates (think social media). Alternatively you could research potential candidates by looking up resumes on Indeed resume search and contact them for free.

Also the applicant tracking systems like the Resumator and Smart Recruiters both have free job boards they syndicate to, an example list is below and linked. You might check some of them out. Although I suspect many of them will charge employers for direct postings.

Human Resource analytics do not require an advanced degree in mathematics, economics or statistics. Any operations, HR or business management professional can become an expert in their client or companies people based metrics. Just tracking and reviewing some of these metrics is often all the evidence you need to prove or quantify what you already knew about operations, recruitment, benefits and organizational development.

Lets take a look at a simple broad metric, Revenue Per Employee (“RPE”). So compare two similar companies with similar workforces but one has double the revenue per employee. It paints a very different picture of productivity, profitability and compensation at these companies. Based on economic theory and my understanding of scalability, software and manufacturing companies would lead the pack here when it comes to RPE. This is likely due to scalability and the nature of their industry and products. The RPE laggards on the list should be food and professional services (low-tech). The implication is that these low RPE companies and industries often need twice or three times as many employees to produce the same revenue as the higher RPE companies.

A later post will delve deeper into an industry comparison of data I gathered from fast growing Oregon businesses across several industries.